The writer-director returns from a long hiatus with his new film, Damsels in Distress. GQ talks with him about the movie, his "international dance craze," and what he did in those intervening years

Whit Stillman, New York's king of comedy—the comedy of principled, mighty fallen manners, that is—is finally back with his fourth feature, Damsels in Distress. Set at the fictional Seven Oaks College, the film follows a trio of true-blue girls with an offbeat flare and Xanadu projections seeking to refurbish life on campus. The boys are either glib (like Adam Brody's Charlie) or Greek-lettered, loutish blockheads. The student body is either cynical or depressed.

As with Stillman's three previous films—Metropolitan, Barcelona, and The Last Days of Disco—where urban gentry or budding yuppies muse delusively, often delectably, to a chosen outsider, Damsels is a similarly eloquent shuffle through the dynamics of a particular fishbowl. Romantic entanglements ensue. Sleuthing, false identities, and strange sex practices follow. The Sambola! (an international dance craze) is invented, on hand, as antidote. GQ chatted with Stillman about his first film in more than a decade.

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GQ: It's been 13 years since your last film was released. What kind of anxiety, anticipation, and even fear of failing have you experienced in the years leading up to Damsels?
Whit Stillman: Yeah, I had a lot of time to think about all of that. There's a line in Metropolitan where the Charlie character played by Taylor Nichols is in a conversation with a man at a bar and Charlie's trying to say they're all doomed to failure because of their background, and the guy contradicts him. He says, "To the contrary, that no, they've just failed but they are not doomed to failure." And Charlie will not let go, and he keeps saying things like, "Well maybe the failure will come later." And in that time, in those years, I was thinking, "Okay, this is the failure that's coming later, the failure we talked about in Metropolitan. Here it is! Charlie was right!" In the film, I sort of made fun of Charlie but actually he was right—failure does come later.

GQ: What did these in-between years look like?
Whit Stillman: I have three hats, and one is kind of a bogus hat. And that is that of producer. So I actually am the writer of the film, although I might not feel authentic or cut out for it, that's become a reality. I'm the director of the films, and then I'm the producer of the films. But I'm the producer of the films when there's someone else who can say, "Here's the money to make the film." Except with Metropolitan, I did raise the money myself. But with the other films, it was very much, "We have money, go make the film." I get a line producer who really does the budgeting and the work, and the worrying, and then I get to choose, "Well, let's not spend money on the professional dancers, let's do something else." But it's not really hard production work. And then what I found with this case, because I was not in the arena which my friends at Castle Rock operate, I was trying to make very different kinds of films, and I was trying to do them out of London. The equation or the formula or whatever it was that I had wasn't working at all. People thought it was a stretch and that it was too much. They said, "What is preppy New Yorker, Whit Stillman, doing with black kids in 1962 Kingston, Jamaica?"

GQ: Which is the next project you are in fact working on, right?
Whit Stillman: Yes, I still hope to make it at some point. And also I think, while there is an audience for our films and there are people who like them, like people in the business would respect that we had done something that was well regarded by other people, they actually didn't like the film. I mean the films were not their films, their cup of tea. I fell in with a group of funders in Britain for whom our films were not their thing. They tend to like bleak dramas, to be honest. But I didn't realize how bad things were because I was worrying mostly about the scripts, and the scripts were generally going pretty well. So I was I happy. I was living in this beautiful place, Paris, and had this sort of interesting personal life. And I didn't really realize that these films I thought were going to happen are not going to happen. And they don't tell you know right off that it's not going to happen.

GQ: How does it feel when you do find out?
Whit Stillman: Well generally, I was like, "Okay. Good. I'll have more time on that script and now I can work on another one." I was like a grazing cow thinking, "Oh there's grass in this pasture that I haven't eaten."

GQ: You've got such a positive outlook!
Whit Stillman: Yeah, I tend to be a little Pollyanna-ish. So you know the idea that this was really a crisis state, and even as years would pass, I still had this script to write or that script. There was always some positive thing happening amidst the horrible failure.

GQ: The damsels in Damsels, especially Violet, like characters in your past films, adhere to odd certainties and are fond of giving advice no matter how convoluted or out-of-date. What draws you to these characters?
Whit Stillman: Well, I like kind of heroic characters who aren't afraid to say stuff. I guess I am a little afraid to say stuff. I find them funny and larger than life, and appealing. It's escapism for me. And what I've noticed with these characters, the dynamic that is, if they're not very nice or constructive or positive, it's a little bit too bitter for the audience to take. The Kate Beckinsale character in Disco was hard for people to tolerate. Where the Nick character (Chris Eigeman) in Metropolitan, was catnip for people. What made him attractive was that he has this pose or reality of being this funny snob, and yet he's being really nice to the sad, timid, awkward, identification character. This is a person who could be really cruel and mean, but they're not. And that's Violet's trump too. She's just a nice person who had habits we associate with someone who's not nice. Also, you have to admit, some of that niceness has that trace of the condescension, and people hate condescension. You know they say that "No good deed goes unpunished," and that's a little bit what happens to Violet. And I've noticed it too.